Small ruminants
can fit into farms in a variety of ways. Their grazing preferences
make them ideal animals to feed on weeds, brush, and other plants that
cattle often won't eat (multiflora rose and pigweed are two notorious
examples).
The small size of sheep and goats makes them less likely to damage
wet soils. They are easier to work with than cattle, cheaper to buy and maintain,
and require less equipment. They are prolific and do well on forages.

The varied
products of small ruminants — milk, cheese, wool, meat, leather
or skins, manure, and specialty items like soaps and lotions — are easy
to
market, once a market is found. Current prices for meat goats and lambs are
very good. Because goats and sheep mature quickly and have a short gestation,
farmers can bring products to market very quickly, improving their cash flow.
This also means that herd and flock sizes can be rapidly increased.
Return on investment is usually better for small ruminant
enterprises than for cattle.
—Excerpted from ATTRA's recently
published Small Ruminant Sustainability Checksheet,
an excellent tool to help farmers evaluate their sheep and goat operations.

What
are Ruminants? Ruminants are grazing animals whose complex stomachs are capable
of digesting large quantities of grasses and shrubs. Sheep and goats are known
as small ruminants. For more information see ATTRA's Goats:Sustainable
Production Overview.

Katahdin sheep at Round Mountain Farm, Arkansas. Katahdins have been used in parts of the Southeast to control kudzu.

A grant awarded to Dr. Karen Launchbaugh (University of Idaho)
and Dr. John Walker (Texas A&M University) will result in a much-needed
new handbook, Prescribed Grazing for Vegetation Management: A Handbook
for Sheep and Goat Producers and Land Managers. NCAT staff have been
invited to contribute to this new guide, which is funded by USDA's National
Sheep Industry Improvement Center. The ATTRA Web site will be a gateway
to the new manual, which will be published in early 2006. Other partners
on the project include the American Sheep Industry Association, the Joe
Skeen Institute for Rangeland Restoration, and the Montana Sheep Institute.

The new
handbook will address the details of managing grazing sheep and goats to remove
weeds, reduce fire frequency, and improve plant composition on rangelands and
wildlife habitat. Many states are facing serious land management problems due
to the spread of flammable brush, leafy spurge, spotted knapweed, yellow starthistle,
cheatgrass, salt cedar, and kudzu.
Property owners generally hire crews
to apply expensive herbicides or to
hoe, chop, and burn unwanted
vegetation. Sheep and goats are
proving to be an even more effective
tool.

In the
Northern Great Plains, for example, leafy spurge aggressively
competes with native plants on more
than 3 million acres of rangeland.
Cattle avoid grazing leafy spurge, but small ruminants find it a nutritious
and desirable forage. In many areas
of Montana and North Dakota, sheep
and goats are reducing the dominance
of leafy spurge for as little as
$.60 per acre, compared to a cost of
$35 per acre to spray herbicides from
a helicopter.

According
to Dr. John Walker, the traditional products of the sheep and
goat industry — meat, wool, and
dairy products — are vulnerable to
foreign competition, but vegetation
management is not. Furthermore,
controlled grazing can convert
unwanted vegetation on power line
easements, irrigation canals, roadsides,
forest plantations, and orchards
into saleable products. For
more information on the project and
related topics, contact NCAT Agriculture
Specialist Linda Coffey at lindac@ncat.org.

Only Ewes
Can Prevent Wildfire
In the fire-prone West, a growing
number of small ruminant
producers use their animals to
create fire breaks between suburbs
and the flammable wildlands. In
the "Only Ewes Can Prevent
Wildfire" program near Carson
City, Nevada, sheep grazed a
fenced corridor around the city,
removing 71 to 83% of easily
ignitable vegetation. A survey of
nearby homeowners revealed that
more than 90% supported the
project and preferred the sheep to
traditional chemical or mechanical
methods of creating fire
breaks. To learn more about
managing animals to reduce fire
danger, see the CD Goats! For Firesafe Homes in
Wildland Areas listed below in the Sheep and Goats Resource section.

Visual appraisal is one way to evaluate an animalís health. Photo courtesy USDA.

Internal
parasites are a major health concern for sheep and goats. The problem
is compounded by the fact that the parasites are rapidly becoming
resistant to de-worming medications. Therefore, management must be the
primary method for sustainable control of internal parasites You can reduce
parasite problems by having a low stock density and rotating your animals to
different pastures.

All parasite
infestations occur when the animal ingests the infective larval
stage in contaminated pasture, hay, or living quarters. The larvae develop
from eggs that were passed from an animal through its feces. Because the
larvae do not climb up very high on grass blades, removing animals from
pastures before the plants are grazed shorter than four inches will help
prevent infestations. Letting animals browse on vines, shrubs, and woody
plants will also help. Including cattle and poultry in your rotation is a
good
idea, since they ingest the parasites of sheep and goats without harm, removing
larvae from the pasture.

Symptoms
of a parasite problem include weight loss, rough coat, depression,
and anemia (evidenced by pale mucous membranes, especially in the
lower eyelid or gums). It is important to realize that heavily infected animals
are "seeding" the pastures with parasite larvae. Culling severely
affected
animals will decrease the herd's problems by reducing pasture contamination
and by selecting for parasite-resistant animals.

Dempsy Perkins and part of his Gulf Coast
Native flock on shearing day, April 2003. Photo by Ken
Coffey.

As a sheep farmer and a knitter, I personally enjoy working with
wooled
sheep and using natural fibers such as wool and mohair to make
beautiful
and useful items. And I'm not alone. Jamie Gunthal, publicist
for Interweave
Press, visited with me recently about the tremendous current
interest in
spinning and knitting. During the past three years, the newsstand
sales of one
of their magazines, Spin-Off, increased by 46%. Their readership
(of a magazine
geared to hand spinners) is now more than 27,000. According to
the Craft
Fair Council of America, one out of every five women under the
age of 45
knows how to knit. It is estimated that 34 million knitters and
crocheters are
in the United States right now.

I
have to admit that the price of commodity wool does not provide
much
incentive to keep raising wooled sheep. That is, unless you can
find a way to
make more money from the wool you grow. As sheep farmer Ken Hargis
of
Morning Glory Farm, Bentonville, Arkansas, says, “When
you have a market
that pays $4 per pound for raw wool or $40 per pound for wool
yarn, versus
30 to 40 cents per pound from a wool broker, it changes the way
you look at
your sheep. Instead of focusing on size and fertility, your emphasis
shifts to
wool quality and yield. Color, fineness, crimp, and softness
are all qualities
you breed for. The lambs are a bonus—not only for the meat
markets but for
the fiber markets as well, since clean “hogget” (first)
fleeces command a
premium price from hand spinners.

"We
have expanded our farm operation to include a retail shop and
a teaching studio," Hargis says. "It is our goal to
be able to sell all of the wool
we grow on our farm in one form or another to crafters and fiber
artists."
Contact Ken and Jan Hargis, 3168 Ozark Acres, Bentonville, AR 72712.

Dempsy
and Brenda Perkins of Louisiana also market their wool effectively.
They raise Gulf Coast Native sheep, a
rare breed. Their focus is on conserving
the breed and making a living at the
same time. I had the pleasure of attending
one of their "Wool Days" in April
2003, when the family invited hand
spinners to come out and watch the
sheep shearing and select some fleeces
fresh off the sheep. The farm was very
attractive, the atmosphere enjoyable,
with musicians playing fiddles and
banjos, handspinners working in the
open air, and the farm shop open for business. The Perkinses
send some of
their fleeces to MacAusland's Woollen Mill on Prince Edward
Island, where
the fleece is converted into beautiful blankets sold in the farm
shop. Contact
Dempsy and Brenda Perkins at P.O. Box 1, Reeves, LA 70658.

Liz
Gipson, editor of Spin-Off magazine, emphasizes that
there is a great
need for the farming community to communicate with the crafting
community.
We farmers must do a better job of understanding what we can
sell, and not
wasting the assets we have. As Ken Hargis says, "If a farmer
has wooled
sheep and doesn't market the wool, it's like letting
a crop rot on the ground."
For more information, contact me at lindac@ncat.org.

The
Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and the National Campaign for Sustainable
Agriculture have provided this update on funding approved for key
sustainable agriculture programs within USDA in the omnibus bill passed
in
November 2004. Congress began its 109th session on January 4, and in
a few
weeks they will begin considering new funding bills for FY06, which
begins
on October 1.

To
learn about current and future funding for these and more than 20 other
key programs, including conservation programs provided for in the
2002
Farm Bill, please contact Margaret Krome at 608-238-1440 or
mkrome@inxpress.net.

Note:
The following programs are also reduced by a .83% across-the-board
cut, which
is not reflected in the chart numbers.

ATTRAnews is the bi-monthly newsletter of the
National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service. The newsletter
is distributed free throughout the United States to farmers,
ranchers, Cooperative Extension agents, educators and others
interested in sustainable agriculture. ATTRA is funded through
the USDA Rural Business-Cooperative Service and is a project
of the National Center for Appropriate
Technology (NCAT), a private,
non-profit organization that since 1976 has helped people by
championing small-scale, local and sustainable solutions to reduce
poverty, promote healthy communities, and protect natural resources.